Fifty years ago, in June of 1968, an Ontario government report, entitled,Living and Learning, captured the experimental flavour of the late 1960s and rocked the Ontario educational world. While that report created a major creative disruption, it disappeared like a meteorite and, a decade later, was widely dismissed as a passing phase. Its influence in reaffirming ‘progressive education’ ideals cannot be over-estimated and, in many ways, the ghost of Hall-Dennis haunts K-12 education still. It remains the one report that sparked progressive thinking in provincial school systems right across Canada.

When it first appeared, the Ontario Hall-Dennis Report, named after its co-chairs, Emmett Hall and Lloyd Dennis, was greeted with lavish praise, mostly generated by the Toronto popular media. Unlike previous dry and formalistic government reports, it conveyed a powerful message with catchy slogans such as “the truth shall make us free” and images of smiling children at play in the schools.

The attractive and well-packaged report was so impressive that even Ontario Education Minister William G. Davis was initially swayed by its charms. Even though it was not formally endorsed by the Ontario government, it was essentially the brainchild of Deputy Education Minister J.R. (Jack) McCarthy and his freshly-recruited band of “progressive education” acolytes within the Department.

When the Report was released on June 12, 1968, the Toronto media were effusive in their praise for the three-year study with its 258 sweeping recommendations. It was “a revolutionary blueprint for education,” The Toronto Daily Star proclaimed, and nothing short of “a radical program to liberate our school system.”Even the normally dour Toronto Globe and Mailjumped on the bandwagon. With a big splash, The Globe’s news team of Barrie Zwicker and Douglas Sagi welcomed the Report as one that recommended “Ontario’s educational system be turned upside down and all the old ways of doing things be shaken from it.” Education Minister Davis’s mere presence at the official announcement was interpreted as an endorsement, even though he cautioned that it was only “a step in the right direction for planning.”

The initial editorials were equally rapturous and reflected the irreverent spirit of the times. In its lead editorial, The Globe and Mail heralded the Hall-Dennis Report as truly revolutionary in the sense that, unlike other commission or inquiry reports, it would not be “retired to gather dust.” Its ringing endorsement of the report was total and unqualified:

The school system it envisions would abolish all the multiplicity of rigidities that now dominate the child, and set him free to search, with assistance, for the truth….What the report does is to set a goal –creative, conscienceful (sic), human –away out ahead of the solemn strivers in the present educational prisons. It may frighten and infuriate, but by degrees, it will also force, by its sheer rightness, the changes that we all know must be made.

Not to be outdone, The Toronto Daily Star appropriated “the language of the hippies” and noted that the Report “advises us to let every schoolchild ‘do his own thing.’” Conscious of how it sounded, the editorialists hastened to add that the “carefully reasoned recommendations of this excellent report” would never “stoop to such ‘pop’ language.” But it was too late for such qualifiers. Most of the popular commentaries latched onto the line that the Report was an open invitation for students to “do their own thing” in Ontario’s public schools.

The Globe and Mail’s influential and widely-read columnist Richard J. Needham quickly emerged as one of the Report’s champions. He was, in the mid-to- late 1960s, a popular but quixotic Toronto cultural figure, a balding, pipe-smoking and a ‘pied piper’ for the rising youth culture. Viewed by most parents as an aged “hippie,” he paid close attention to, and gave voice to, the young and restless. Needham’s daily newspaper ramblings were wildly popular with school teachers and even read by more studious teens, like me.

Needham’s pronouncements on the Report carried some weight at the time. “It’s a good report,” he told his readers, because it reflected “what he had observed visiting hundreds of public schools over the previous three years.” In Needham’s familiar overblown rhetoric, it promised an end to “fear, threats, humiliations, beatings…” He went even further. The “Ontario Establishment,” he wrote, “lives by fear, threats, humiliations, beatings; being anti-people, It doesn’t know any other way to run things…” He then offered this memorable prediction:

…the schools will keep right on being at worst operated like grim penitentiaries and at best like cloistered monasteries – cut off from the real world of life, strife, adventure, change, triumph, disaster, action, beauty, glory, and poetry. Stop thinking about the Taj Mahal and get your nose into that algebra book! Don’t you want a good job in the glue factory?

Inciting rabid debate and stirring a reaction was his stock-and-trade and the Hall-Dennis Report provided him with plenty of fodder.

Socially aware Ontario teens and ‘hip’ high school English teachers simply ate up Needham’s regular comments, especially on the subject “doing your own thing” over the objections of stuffy, old-fashioned parents. One of those receptive teens was Fred Freeman, a politically-active Grade 11 student at Toronto’s Bathurst Heights Collegiate. He wholeheartedly agreed with Needham. There was “something wrong with the way high schools are run,” he told The Toronto Daily Star. “Who else can decide what a student is to learn except the student himself,?” he asked, before complaining that being forced to study Latin from Grade 10 onward squelched his enjoyment of learning. Such viewpoints only echoed those of Needham and fixed, in the public mind, the distinct but rather misleading impression that the Report was a colourful recipe book for an “anything goes” brand of education.

The Report did not spring out of nowhere. It was actually an outgrowth of the progressive educational philosophy inspired by American educator John Dewey then being espoused by Deputy Minister McCarthy. A student-centred, team-teaching, open concept school model had been seeded in 1962 with a few pilot schools, including Pleasant Avenue Public School in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale, Ontario. What had begun in 1965 as a modestly conceived elementary curriculum review had gradually morphed into a full-blown committee of inquiry into the aims of education with an ever-expanding mandate.

The Committee, aseducation researcher Eric W. Ricker demonstrated, was a classic example of a bureaucratically-driven consensus-building exercise. It was structured in a fashion recommended by McCarthy and the Department; its agendas and working papers were drafted by Department staff; almost all of the initial expert testimony was provided by the ‘educrats’; and , finally, a number of its key members were “insiders’– close associates, or former teachers and professors, of members of the Department’s curriculum branch. Although the Committee of 22 appointed members was described by Lloyd Dennis as a group of “all sorts” chosen from a “grab bag,” it was, in Ricker’s words, “clearly biased before its work even commenced.”

In the three-year-long study, McCarthy and his officials skilfully steered the Committee in the direction of “progressivism.” While the Committee had its share of traditionalists, as well as a number of Catholic members, both French and English, the progressives gained the upper hand in its internal workings. The predominantly child-centred philosophy conveyed in the briefs was reinforced by the” professionals” relatively unencumbered by the usual teacher federation pressures and constraints. The addition of Charles E. Phillips, the reputed dean of Canadian educational history, to the Committee strengthened the hand of progressives.

Most significantly, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), which favoured a reformed traditionalist approach, was effectively marginalized on the Committee. The OSSTF’s one lone representative was, in fact, no longer a high school teacher by the time the Committee got down to serious work. Under such favourable conditions, the progressive educators were able to seize the initiative in not only planning the Committee’s work, but also in drafting its recommendations. That decision would turn out to be a critical mistake when, within weeks, a furious and determined opposition began to take shape among high school teachers, university academics, local chambers of commerce, and captains of industry.

What caused the Great Disruption associated with the arrival of the Hall-Dennis Report? Where did the progressive ideas espoused in the Report actually originate? What can be learned about the shaping of a “broad consensus” in education politics? To what extent was the over-hyping of the Report responsible for the fierce debate that ensued in education circles?